Land and Legend

The Irish lake and mountain scenery is, on the whole, less bold and broken than the Scotch, but more varied than that of England, and has a charm of soft melancholy which harmonizes with the poetic dreamings of Irish legendary literature. Every lake, mountain, and valley has its own legend. On the Lakes of Killarney Irish boatmen still describe the foam-crested waves flung out by some waterfall as "O'Donoghue's horses," O'Donoghue being the patronymic of a great house, whose descendants have come down to our own times. The traveller who sails over Loch Neagh is told of the buried city whose towers may be seen shining beneath the waters. With the first dawn of Christianity upon the island the building of great churches and abbeys began almost everywhere, and the ruins of some of these are still a peculiar feature of Irish landscape. Even the marshy regions have a charm for the artistic eye, and are haunted by poetic legends. The most unsympathetic stranger travelling through the island could hardly describe it as a natural home for the prosaic and the commonplace.

Featured Books

Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (also onKindle) is an American widow’s account of her travels in Ireland in 1844–45 on the eve of the Great Famine. Sailing from New York, she set out to determine the condition of the Irish poor and discover why so many were emigrating to her home country. Mrs Nicholson’s recollections of her tour among the peasantry are still revealing and gripping today. The author returned to Ireland in 1847–49 to help with famine relief and recorded those experiences in the rather harrowingAnnals of the Famine in Ireland (Kindle version here).

Annals of the Famine in Ireland is Asenath Nicholson's sequel to Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger. The undaunted American widow returned to Ireland in the midst of the Great Famine and helped organise relief for the destitute and hungry. Her account is not a history of the famine, but personal eyewitness testimony to the suffering it caused. For that reason, it conveys the reality of the calamity in a much more telling way. The book is also available in Kindle.

The Scotch-Irish in America tells the story of how the hardy breed of men and women, who in America came to be known as the ‘Scotch-Irish’, was forged in the north of Ireland during the seventeenth century. It relates the circumstances under which the great exodus to the New World began, the trials and tribulations faced by these tough American pioneers and the enduring influence they came to exert on the politics, education and religion of the country.